(Im)Personal Old Stuff

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Friday, November 24. 2006

For a while now, I've been looking for a game engine/software that would be easy enough for my kid to use. I tried a few, including the Scrolling Game Development Kit but just couldn't find something both simple and powerful. Then I found Game Maker by Mark Overmars.

From the Game Maker website:

Using easy to learn drag-and-drop actions, you can create professional looking games within very little time. You can make games with backgrounds, animated graphics, music and sound effects, and even 3d games! And when you've become more experienced, there is a built-in programming language, which gives you the full flexibility of creating games with Game Maker. What is best, is the fact that Game Maker can be used free of charge.

After working through the tutorials I wanted to use a game I knew and model it in GM. I chose asteroids, as this style of game wasn't detailed in any of the tutorials I could find. This was done in the unregistered 6.1 version of GameMaker. It uses somewhat crude placeholder graphics I had thrown together, much like the original vector game...

Friday, November 3. 2006

his is a test of the Dynamic Text Replacement plugin[?] I am working on for Serendipity. It dynamically renders text using the GD library, and replace it with an image of that text. There are a variety of options that are shown in the main body of this posting. The letter T at the start of the article was even generated by this plugin using the fon colton obtained from Fonts 101.

I had previous dabbled with some ways of dynamically rendering text using the GD image library to create headers and titles. I had enquired in the forums if there was interest in extending this to a markup plugin, andthe response was lukewarm. I had cobbled together a plugin, and decided to clean it up an release it either to use as is, or for someone else to include the code in their software.

Note that the image ALT text included the original text, for accessability reasons. More examples follow...